3. Visual Art and the Great
Depression
The nation looked expectantly to President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, who was inaugurated in March 1933. The new
administration swiftly initiated a wide-ranging series of
economic recovery programs called the New Deal. The
President realized that Americans needed not only
employment but also the inspiration art could provide.
On December 8, 1933, the Advisory Committee to the
Treasury on Fine Arts organized the Public Works of Art
Project (PWAP). Within days sixteen regional committees
were recruiting artists who eagerly set to work in all parts of
America. Between December 1933 and June 1934, the PWAP
hired 3,749 artists who created 15,663 paintings, murals,
sculptures, prints, drawings, and craft works.
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The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience: I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.
